Sheryl Sandberg: Chief operator

11:57Zing Tsjeng:Well, that was quite a powerful argument and it made her mind up. So Cheryl joined Google right at the moment. The company's trajectory was going stratospheric. She began running both sales and operations for Google's advertising platform AdWords, which placed the third ads on Google and was soon also in charge of a programme to place ads on external websites as well.

12:17Simon Jack:In 2002, she oversaw a huge deal with AOL, then a real tech giant, which saw Google agree to pay AOL$150 million a year to become its search engine. Now, this was a massive risk for Google because they only had 10 million in the bank at the time, but it paid off. So no wonder colleagues described her as tough and fearless.

12:37Zing Tsjeng:In fact, everything Cheryl was doing was crucial to Google's success because it was her work that was making the company profitable. She was providing fuel for the rocket for the company's incredible growth. Worth around$86 million when she joined, when Google had an IPO in August 2004, it was valued at$23 billion. So that is an extraordinary explosion in value. And Cheryl, like many at Google, were paid partly in stock options, the options to own shares. She would have certainly been a millionaire at this point.

13:07Simon Jack:So in 2004, a few months after she married fellow tech boss Dave Goldberg, in the year she moved into that sprawling mansion in Atherton, California, the neighbourhood Forbes magazine would soon name the US's most expensive zip code, we can safely say that Sheryl Sandberg was a millionaire.

13:29Zing Tsjeng:But let us find out how she went swiftly from a million to a thousand times that to a billion. By the time she left Google, the company was the USA's fifth biggest company, with a market cap of over$200 billion.

13:44Simon Jack:And a market cap is how much it's worth?

13:46Zing Tsjeng:A market cap is how much it's worth. If you add up all the shares and times to buy how much each share is worth, what would it cost? And she'd gone from running a team of four, remember that, to running a team of 4 ,000. She was worth tens of millions, but wasn't yet near a billion. But her next job would take her all the way there.

14:03Simon Jack:Now this part of Cheryl's story will be familiar to anyone who's listened to our episode on Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg because, of course, her next role was at Facebook. Now Cheryl and Mark first met at Silicon Valley Christmas party in 2007. And for the next six weeks, the pair had dinner together at Sandberg's house once or twice a week in a manner that Cheryl's own husband likened to dating.

14:26Zing Tsjeng:Yeah, it wasn't your traditional job interview process. They apparently asked each other philosophical questions about what they believed in and cared about. They were sort of testing each other out. Could they work together? Could they take each other to the next level? The dynamic between them was interesting. Mark was still just 23, inexperienced, but with a product in Facebook that was changing the way the world communicated. And although Cheryl was still only 38, she was the wise old head who knew how giant companies ran. She'd been there, done it and made them profitable.

14:55Simon Jack:And Facebook was on the very same trajectory that Google had been when Sheryl joined. It had already made Zuckerberg the world's youngest ever self-made billionaire, but it was yet to become a profitable business.

15:07Zing Tsjeng:Yes, in fact, Facebook was losing money, but it was also growing its user base at an incredible rate. So Sheryl, like many big name early investors in Facebook, including billionaires Peter Thiel and Bill Gates, previous billionaires on the show, she saw enormous potential. and with Google faltering as the 2008 financial crisis arrived, the upside for a move for Cheryl looked pretty huge. She would once again be able to swerve a financial crash by being somewhere too unprofitable to be affected much by market losses. It's kind of an odd situation to be in and could once again ride the rocket after the crash into enormous profits.

15:41Zing Tsjeng:But this time she'd be much higher up the chain of command and so she'd reap much greater monetary rewards.

15:47Simon Jack:For his part, Zuckerberg knew that his skill set was in setting out a vision and understanding the analytics. So he was a tech wonder kid. But what he didn't know was how to run a massive corporation with thousands of employees. Cheryl was exactly what Mark needed. So it was time to take things to the next level and make it official. In March 2008, Cheryl quit Google and accepted Mark's job offer to become Facebook's COO.

16:12Zing Tsjeng:Yes, and as we said, that's often problem solver in chief, how to get the gubbins of a company ticking over and working properly.

16:18Simon Jack:Well, apparently the moment Cheryl was installed at Facebook, there was a real obvious difference of management style between her and Mark Zuckerberg. Because Zuckerberg is famously known for being quite robotic and impersonal. But apparently Sandberg ingratiated herself with Facebook employees by spending time to go up to hundreds of staffers at their desks and personally introduce herself. Can you imagine her doing that?

16:41Zing Tsjeng:I've never found her in the sort of touchy-feely mode. But I do think that she's clearly capable of that in a way that I think Mark Zuckerberg, because I've interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, and, you know, he's famously robotic. I don't think he is naturally robotic, but his delivery is a little robotic. He's a bit of a cold fish. So I think they're very, very different characters for sure.

17:03Simon Jack:Well, she may have made some friends at Facebook, but what she was really there to do was to make it a lot of money. And she reportedly spent the next few months figuring out a business plan, meeting with senior executives every evening between 6 and 9pm and considering all the options, like should Facebook introduce subscription fees? Should it get into e-commerce? You know, all these kind of things that tech companies ask themselves in order to make themselves profitable.

17:27Zing Tsjeng:Yeah, and the solution she came up with would prove hugely successful. But considering Cheryl's previous experience at Google, it might seem obvious. Now, her success there had been based on utilising the personal data Google harvested about its users to enable advertisers to target users more effectively. What Google knew was the search history of each of its many users. Facebook, of course, also had all sorts of personal data on its users. So a targeted advertising model was, I would say, the inevitable way to go.

17:57Simon Jack:The decision was made. It wasn't long before Facebook was in the black. And in fact, as soon as 2009, in Cheryl's first full year at the company, Facebook reported profits. and that very same year she appeared on the Forbes list of the world's 100 most powerful women for the first time. She was ranked number 55 on a list headed up by German Chancellor Angela Merkel. So not bad going.

18:18Zing Tsjeng:Yeah, but her business acumen was being recognised in other industries too. She got plum roles in other massive corporations. She was on the board at Disney. She was a director at Starbucks, earning valuable stock options in both those companies along the way and, you know, enhancing her wealth. And in 2010, she gave a TED Talk titled Why We Have Too Few Women Leaders, which has had millions of views and really started to position her as a pretty key voice, massive voice for women in business.

18:47Simon Jack:Meanwhile, the alliance between Zuckerberg, who wanted to make a cool website with awesome features, and Sandberg, who knew how to run a successful company, was enabling Facebook to go from just being another popular website to becoming a trillion dollar business. and the pair stayed in their lane. So Zuckerberg had final say on all matters, but he kept himself busy with features and product updates, doubling the platform's user base and Cheryl's first year alone. And as CEO, founder and chair, he would step in to personally negotiate big deals like Facebook's billion dollar takeover of Instagram in 2012 and the$21 billion acquisition of WhatsApp in 2014.

19:24Zing Tsjeng:Just such massive acquisitions, those. I mean, it can't overstate the importance. And I do not believe that those mergers would be allowed by competition authorities today. So they got in just in the nick of time.

19:37Simon Jack:You may also remember Zuckerberg's cameo in our episode about the Snapchat founder Evan Spiegel and his failed attempt to purchase that company in 2013. So our Mark Zuckerberg, he likes a shopping spree.

19:48Zing Tsjeng:Yeah, he does. They're staying in their lanes thing, I think is really important. So he was the figurehead of the company. He oversaw the rebrand to Meta. He introduced the world to the fateful Metaverse the same year. but all the time let Cheryl get on with running the company day to day. He once said she handles things I don't want to. But I also think that had he poked his nose too much into her business, she would not have liked it and probably would have walked because that would be the kind of person she is.

20:13Simon Jack:And Cheryl's work was making Mark very rich, right? So he was remunerating her commensurately while her salary was reportedly a mere$300 ,000 a year. Her stock options are the things that would make her a billionaire. So financial filings at the time of Facebook's IPO in May 2012 showed that Shero owned more than 38 million stock units, although they had certain restrictions placed on them.

20:36Zing Tsjeng:Yeah. So basically you reward executives by giving them. Sometimes you give them just shares, but they're called restricted shares, which means you can't sell them immediately. They basically vest or become available to sell over a period of years. It's a way of keeping people at the company longer term. or it's a stock option which basically I give you the right in the future to buy a share at today's price but in times in the future when hopefully the shares will be worth more so each option will have more value. And it's an incentive for you and all the other employees who get them to try and push up the share price of the company and make it more valuable.

21:12Simon Jack:Because in the future you're going to get a real discount.

21:14Zing Tsjeng:Exactly. You get the opportunity to buy something that costs$100. For$10 it's worth$90 per option to you. That's kind of how the maths works.

21:23Simon Jack:Well, when the IPO took place in certain conditions were met, some of her stocks, as you say, vested, meaning they became real shares in Facebook. And as soon as she could, Cheryl then sold off many of her shares. And this is a trend she actually would continue throughout her time at the company.

21:36Zing Tsjeng:Interesting one that, I mean, that having worked at some companies, you're not encouraged to sell your shares the earliest possible opportunity. You're encouraged to have most of your net worth still invested in the company. So I think that's quite an interesting thing. And probably a bad decision on her part, because if she just hung on to them, the real explosion in the value of what is now meta, she would be even richer than we are discussing today.

22:01Simon Jack:Exactly. I also feel like maybe it would scare the horses a bit and spook other employees. Like if Cheryl Sandberg's selling her shares, what am I doing? Exactly.

22:08Zing Tsjeng:Well, that's why people are not encouraged to do it. The last thing you want is the most senior people seeing to sell because the other employees think, well, does she know that I don't know? So it's a very unusual trait that. But it was a massive hike in Facebook value on the back of a huge increase in profit in 2013 that made her one of the super rich. January 2014, they had an earnings call which reported an eightfold increase in profits to half a billion dollars per quarter. Due in no small part to sales, things like ads and what have you, up 63%. Facebook's share price skyrocketed. And Cheryl, who at this point owned 12 million shares in the company, became a billionaire.

22:46Simon Jack:Forbes added her to their list of billionaires the same year, so she'd made it. In 2014, Sheryl Sandberg was a billionaire.

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24:48Zing Tsjeng:Now let us take Sheryl Sandberg beyond a billion.

24:52Simon Jack:Sheryl Sandberg may have become a billionaire in 2014, but she was already a rock star executive long before that. From 2011 onwards, she consistently made the top 10 in the Forbes list of the most powerful women in the world. And her public profile, even outside the business world, had been further bolstered by the 2013 publication of her book, Lean In, Women, Work and the Will to Lead. And this, I think, is a time when most people will have heard the words Sheryl Sandberg. Lean In was packaged with a rave reveal from, I mean, who else? Mark Zuckerberg. And it positioned itself as this kind of business focused self-help book for women, encouraging them to lean in by asserting themselves at work and at home.

25:30Simon Jack:And it did really well. It was hailed as the business manual of the year by the Times. It even became synonymous, I think, with female empowerment in the workplace. It tried to change the conversation from what women couldn't do to what women can do, i.e. lean in.

25:45Zing Tsjeng:However, the book has come in for criticism from those who feel it offers simple solutions to complex issues, toes a corporate line and essentially props up the status quo in the workplace. New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd even called Sandberg a PowerPoint pied piper in Prater ankle boots. That's quite the line. Ouch. I must confess, I haven't read it.

26:06Simon Jack:I've read extracts of it.

26:07Zing Tsjeng:Okay.

26:08Simon Jack:It doesn't really try to reinvent the wheel. It's just kind of a corporate manual. But I will say that in the years after that, people did sort of turn on this entire idea of leaning in and being a girl boss. The kind of corporate, high-flying, high-achieving woman that Sheryl Sandberg personified. It kind of fell out of fashion. And I think now a lot of people look at it much more critically.

26:30Zing Tsjeng:Well, whatever you think of it, it was a huge hit to reach number one on the New York Times bestseller list. It sold four million copies. So Cheryl could add bestselling author to her list of accomplishments. And alongside the book, Cheryl also launched the Lean In Foundation, a non-profit organisation dedicated to empowering women and girls to achieve their ambitions and creating equal and inclusive workplaces.

26:52Simon Jack:So come 2015, everything was looking rosy for Cheryl Sandberg. But this is when tragedy struck. Her husband, Dave Goldberg, died suddenly and shockingly in a freak accident in a gym while on a family holiday in Mexico. When exercising on a treadmill, Dave had fallen and suffered a fatal head injury.

27:11Zing Tsjeng:Gosh, that does sound like a freak occurrence. As chief executive of online survey company SurveyMonkey, Dave had been a prominent business figure in his own right. And tributes poured in from across the business world. Leaders at Disney, Twitter, LinkedIn, others paid tribute. Even the then US President Barack Obama put out a statement to say that the first family were heartbroken. Cheryl and Dave had two young children and Cheryl was pretty open about her grief at the time.

27:37Simon Jack:Just a month after his death, she wrote a long post on Facebook about her loss alongside a picture of herself on Dave's knee. She talked about how much she still wanted option A, i.e. her life of Dave. But for the sake of her children and to honour her late husband, she was now determined to succeed at option B.

27:54Zing Tsjeng:And that idea led her to her second book called Option B, Facing Adversity, Building Resilience and Finding Joy, published in 2017. But in terms of her career, she stuck very much to Option A, returning to work just 10 days after Dave's death. Her experience did lead her to double paid bereavement leave at Facebook, with weirded workers now able to take 20 days off.

28:18Simon Jack:Cheryl remained COO at Facebook, then met her through a lot of controversies. In 2018, the company admitted that it had failed to prevent its platform being used to incite offline violence in Myanmar against the Rohingya minority earlier that decade. Nonetheless, there followed the Cambridge Analytica scandal and the alleged role of the site in spreading misinformation in the run-up to the US Capitol riots, all of which was denied by Zuckerberg at the time.

28:43Zing Tsjeng:And throughout her time at Facebook and then Meta, as we've discussed, Cheryl aggressively sold off her stock options under scheduled share sale programmes. By the time she stood down from the company in 2022, it was estimated that Sandberg had sold over 75 % of her after-tax shares for a cool$1.7 billion. And as I say, that is pretty unusual. It is behaviour of senior executives, which is generally discouraged. and by the way it turned out to be a horrible financial decision as well she would be worth at least double what she's worth had she hung on to them. Why do you think she did it then? I don't know whether it's a sort of discipline thing whether it's a kind of you know that's what I do you don't want to have your entire net worth invested in the company that you are helping to direct and lead you want to have some insurance policy and not put every last egg in the same basket.

29:36Simon Jack:Sometimes you just got to get that mansion.

29:37Zing Tsjeng:Yeah, well, sometimes you've got to go and put it into other investments. So you've got a more of a balanced portfolio. But to aggressively sell that many all the time, I would love to ask her that question to her face saying what gives and and by the way, do you regret it? Because they're worth more than they were at the time.

29:53Simon Jack:Well, she's focused on her own investments and charitable endeavours since leaving Meta. For investments, she founded Sandberg Berthold Venture Partners with her third husband, Tom Bernthal, whom she married in 2020. And meanwhile, the Lean In Foundation, which had become the Sheryl Sandberg and Dave Goldberg Family Foundation, is now the Sandberg-Goldberg-Bernthal Family Foundation. Quite the mouthful.

30:15Zing Tsjeng:That is a mouthful. So that is where Sheryl's story ends. And now, just for fun, we give her marks out of 10 on some of our billionaire categories. Before we ask you, our audience, to decide whether Sheryl Sandberg is good, bad or just another billionaire.

30:37Zing Tsjeng:So we start with wealth.

30:39Simon Jack:Well, the latest estimates say she's worth$2.4 billion. And, you know, a lot of money has been promised to charities, but questions have been asked about where that money is. She's placed huge amounts of money into the foundation via donor advised funds, which controversially avoid capital gains tax in entirely legal ways. So they offer immediate tax deduction, but they park the money in tax reinvestment accounts indefinitely. There's no legal deadline to distribute the funds to the actual charities. Important to note, though, that Cheryl has never directly commented on these criticisms.

31:10Zing Tsjeng:Yeah, not thought of as a flashy billionaire. I'm not aware of her being seen on a super yacht or anything like that. So if she'd hung on to those shares, she'd be worth a lot more than£2.4 billion. And that's kind of entry level in our category. But she has been round the hoop on some of the greatest wealth creation companies in the history of the world. Hang on, I'm forgetting about the fact that she's actually amassed that as an employee rather than as a founder. Yes. She did time both her runs at these companies impeccably just when Google was exploding and then getting off that and then onto another exploding company in Facebook.

31:48Zing Tsjeng:So I'm going to give her, as an employee billionaire, I'm going to give her a five. I was going to come down on five out of ten as well. We talked a little bit about controversy just then, and there was quite a lot at that time. It's worth checking out our episode on Mark Zuckerberg if you want to know more about all of that. We've mentioned Cambridge Analytica, the misinformation in Myanmar. And as I say, Facebook's role in international politics was being questioned. She had to testify to Congress in 2018 on Facebook's missteps, allegations of voter manipulation in the 2016 election and again in 2021 to deflect blame from the company for its role in the capital riots.

32:27Simon Jack:Yeah, I mean, it's no wonder she wanted a bit of a break from all of that. Since we actually made that episode on Mark Zuckerberg, governments around the world have also begun to recognise the dangers of social media's harmful algorithms. So Australia's actually banned children from social media. The UK is preparing to do the same. And Sandberg herself has, you know, been implicated in creating this kind of media environment. She's been criticised as being one of the key architects of what's called surveillance capitalism. There's one Harvard professor called Shoshana Zuboff who says that Sandberg is as responsible as anyone for one of big tech's most insidious inventions, the collection and organisation of data on social media users, behaviours and preferences.

33:08Zing Tsjeng:But that is the business model. I mean, the famous mantra about this is if the product you're using is free, then you are the product, basically. I like that. Because you're being served up. your eyeballs are being served up to advertisers and your attention, you know, it's the attention economy.

33:26Simon Jack:It's interesting that Sandberg was one of the people in the room when everyone decided, OK, this is how we're going to have to make social media make money. Imagine Facebook as a subscription platform. I don't think it would have made that much money.

33:36Zing Tsjeng:I don't think so. She's also been personally accused of aggressive crisis management. In 2018, the New York Times reported that Sandberg had personally asked Facebook's communications staff to conduct research into George Soros, we've done an episode on him, into George Soros's finances after Soros publicly criticised tech companies, including Facebook, at the World Economic Forum. In fact, I was there watching Soros deliver that very speech at the World Economic Forum. And in a statement, Facebook said the research into Soros was already underway when Cheryl sent an email asking if Mr Soros had shorted Facebook's stock.

34:11Simon Jack:Right.

34:11Zing Tsjeng:We were already surveilling George Soros. It's not her fault at all. OK, so what are we going to give her for controversy? I think it's actually quite high. I think there's, I mean, Facebook's been a lot of controversial scrapes over the years and she's been right at the heart of it. But as the chief operating officer, you would expect. So I'm going to give her a solid seven on controversy.

34:27Simon Jack:I think a seven out of 10 is fair. But that brings us very neatly on to the power category. So clearly she's someone who has enormous amounts of power or at least had enormous amounts of power when she was at the helm of Facebook.

34:40Zing Tsjeng:I think that when she was chief operating officer at Facebook, there would be very few people in the world of technology more powerful than her. she would have been in the top 10. I mean, not so much now, but at her height, I would give her a, I'd give her an eight or a nine.

34:56Simon Jack:Ooh, a nine. Wow.

34:57Zing Tsjeng:No, eight, maybe eight, maybe eight.

34:59Simon Jack:Yeah, I think an eight out of 10. But I mean, well, actually, you know, at the time of Lean In, the book, she became a really powerful lodestar for women entrepreneurialism, for women's economic liberation. You know, people really thought that she held the key to understanding how to make women's work better. So I think I would give her a 9 out of 10 at its height.

35:22Zing Tsjeng:At its height. So 8 from me, 9 from you. And Legacy, she managed to make profitable two of the most profitable companies that have ever existed in Google first and then Facebook, which is now Meta. So I suppose she helped write the blueprint for how to make billions out of technology for both herself and for their shareholders and for the companies.

35:50Simon Jack:And also it's quite hard sometimes for tech companies to make money. I mean, lots of tech companies just always operate at a loss and are hoping to somehow reach the magic payday someday. And she managed to take them there.

36:00Zing Tsjeng:Yeah, she managed to basically, they got the reach, they got the billions of followers, and then they managed to turn the taps, turn the screws on the advertisers by basically off-racing harvested data. And I suppose part of her legacy, but as I say, this is inherent in the business model, is this idea of surveillance capitalism, that the attention economy, they want to probe deep into every recess of my life and my personality in order to make me more likely to buy stuff.

36:31Simon Jack:Anyone who's ever been followed around by adverts all across the Internet will know how that feels.

36:35Zing Tsjeng:Yeah, so legacy. I mean, I'm not going to pin surveillance capitals on her alone, because it's part of the business model. It doesn't exist. You know, Google and Facebook don't really work without it. So I would say give her a legacy. I think probably her legacy would be more as a kind of high flying woman executive, actually. She didn't invent any of this stuff. She just made it make money.

36:59Simon Jack:She just put her perfectly manicured hand on a money tap and turned it on.

37:03Zing Tsjeng:That's really brilliantly put. I'm going to give her four out of ten for Legacy.

37:09Simon Jack:Oh, wow. I actually think I might score her higher. I think I'm going to give her a seven out of ten. OK. Because, I mean, if she hadn't written all those books and done that TED Talk, I actually think she probably would have been slightly forgotten by the history books. But because she made her brand. She put herself out there. Yes, exactly. so I think she's had a lot more reach in the world than she would have as an ordinary CEO of some very enormously profitable companies.

37:33Zing Tsjeng:Can you imagine someone saying who do you think you are? Sheryl Sandberg or something like that? You probably can.

37:37Simon Jack:I can yeah.

37:38Zing Tsjeng:Okay well in which case you're right you give her a seven a four. I love that anecdote about marching her siblings around who had to say right every time she said anything. This is a woman who likes to be right. Generally is right. clearly competence radiates out of her and her ability to solve problems both with people and with process i mean a very very formidable executive and like we say one of the very few people who's ever been paid by someone else who's made it made it to a billionaire yeah we normally

38:09Simon Jack:feature people who had to literally as karl marx put it on the means of production whether it's film studios or companies themselves in order to get to the point of being a billionaire but she was the very rare exception of someone who could receive a paycheck from someone else and still become a billionaire.

38:26Zing Tsjeng:Yeah, incredible. So the question is, is Sheryl Sandberg good, bad or just another billionaire? We want to hear your thoughts.

38:32Simon Jack:Yes, email goodbadbillionaire at bbc.com or drop us a text or WhatsApp to 001 917 686 1176 and tell us what you think.

38:42Zing Tsjeng:That's goodbadbillionaire, all one word, at bbc.com or 001 917 686 1176.

38:50Simon Jack:And don't forget to include your name as we may read out your message on a future episode.

38:55Zing Tsjeng:We've had a few people get in touch with their thoughts on Beyonce, including Jen, who says, I'd say that on balance she's a good billionaire because her wealth has come from sheer talent and her savvy decisions. She doesn't seem to be aiming to achieve millions by being cutthroat or ruthless. More that her millions is a by-product of her passion which has brought joy to many around the world. The fact is she's a global superstar, has achieved this without controversy or stepping on people on the way up. Just goes to highlight her as a fantastic role model to younger audiences. We need more women, especially women of colour, to show what is possible.

39:28Zing Tsjeng:And I say all of this without being a particular fan. While I like her music, what I admire more is her as a person. So for me, she's good.

39:37Simon Jack:Thanks for that, Jen. Nia sent us a WhatsApp also about Beyonce. I was listening to your episode on Beyonce saying even though I love her, to me, she's just another billionaire. She's brilliant, but hasn't done anything good. I mean, her music, sure, but that doesn't do it for me. Well, thanks for offering that opposing viewpoint, Nia.

39:52Zing Tsjeng:Yeah, thank you, Nia. I have to say, I think music is good. So I'm going to have to disagree with you, but I appreciate your position and thank you for your feedback. We also had this email from Umaima from Abuja in Nigeria with her thoughts about Mr Beast, Jimmy Donaldson. Mr Beast, who because of your show I now know is called Jimmy Donaldson, is a good billionaire. Why? Because he's an influencer. Interesting. His giving videos have challenged my 12-year-old to be highly altruistic. He's been inspired to start a business out of which he always makes sure to donate some of his profits for a cause.

40:26Zing Tsjeng:Recently, while away on a trip to Dubai, my son only wanted one thing, Feastables chocolates. He'd done his research and pointed me to the exact supermarkets that stocked them. And get this, he isn't a massive fan of sweets, but he understands that if he help sell the chocolates, Mr. Beast will make more videos, make more money and help more people. That's a good billionaire. Thank you, Umayma. That is very interesting. And thank you to your children.

40:50Simon Jack:Yeah, I mean, starting a business at 12 years old sounds like something a billionaire might do.

40:54Zing Tsjeng:Well, watch this space and maybe we'll have them on in a, you know, if we're still going in a few years time, maybe we'll have them on.

41:10Simon Jack:So who do we have on the next episode of Good Bad Billionaire?

41:13Zing Tsjeng:We have someone who came from the oil-rich Saudi Arabian royal family, but branched out into technology investments and tried to make his name as an international investor.

41:24Simon Jack:Unfortunately, he came back down to earth with a bit of a bump after being held hostage and essentially shaken down for his money in a high-end hotel.

41:32Zing Tsjeng:It was a shake-shakedown when he met someone even richer and more powerful than him in the form of Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Nevertheless, his investments are into some of the most well-known companies that you will know around the world. And that is the story of Prince Al-Waleed on Good Bad Billionaire.

41:49Simon Jack:Good Bad Billionaire is a BBC Studios production for the BBC World Service. It's produced by Mark Ward. The editor is Paul Smith.

41:56Zing Tsjeng:For the BBC World Service, the senior podcast producer is Sarah Green and the commissioning editor is John Manel.